Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/251

Rh

After passing through the lands of the Dinka, Dyoor, Bongo, and Mittoo, and adding much to our knowledge of these people while studying the topography of the country and contributing important discoveries concerning its river system, besides his incessant botanical, entomological, and meteorological observations, he came upon the territory of the Niam-niam. On the 29th of January, 1870, he set out with four Nubian servants, and thirty Bongo bearers, under the protection of Mohammed Aboo Sammat, a magnanimous Nubian merchant, who, sword in hand, had vanquished various districts large enough to have formed small states in Europe. Of this man the author says:

They were soon joined by a caravan consisting of 500 bearers and 120 soldiers, and these with women and slaves made a procession in single file of some 800 people. The incidents of their progress are of the deepest interest, but we have no space for their enumeration. From his account of the Niam-niam people we quote the following:

"The social position of the Niam-niam women differs materially from what is found among other heathen negroes in Africa.

Between the parallels of 3° and 4° north latitude, and 28° and 29° east longitude from Greenwich, in the very heart of Africa, is a territory of some 4,000 square miles, inhabited by the Monbuttoo. The country of the Niam-niam constitutes its northern and northwestern boundaries:

From his account of the Monbuttoo, of of [sic] whom he speaks "as exhibiting a development of indigenous culture entirely different to what can be witnessed all around," we quote the following: